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Rice University

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1912, Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson. 6100 Main Blvd.
  • (Photograph by Gerald Moorhead )

When, in 1909, the trustees of Houston's first university, the William M. Rice Institute, acted on the recommendation of the institute's first president, Edgar Odell Lovett, and retained Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram to plan a campus for the university and design its initial buildings, they must have assumed that Cram would produce the sort of Collegiate Gothic complex for which he and his partner Bertram G. Goodhue had become famous in the early twentieth century. Instead, Cram proposed a Byzantine style for the university's buildings, justifying his choice by asserting that the architecture of medieval Byzantium was the proper historical model for an institution of high culture in a hot, humid, Southern setting.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Gerald Moorhead et al.
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Data

What's Nearby

Robert R. Herring Hall
Lovett Hall
House
Congregation Emanu El Temple
Rice Stadium

Citation

Gerald Moorhead et al., "Rice University", [Houston, Texas], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/TX-01-HN51.

Print Source

Cover: Buildings of Texas

Buildings of Texas: Central, South, and Gulf Coast, Gerald Moorhead and contributors. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013, 344-345.

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